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Topic: Blue screen of death? (Read 981 times)

Microsoft hasn't retired the blue screen of death we all knew so well... It's back, and it's got a new name: The black and blue fading screens of update hell. The first thing you notice... is you can't just turn your machine off and go to bed. You have to choose update and shut down or update and restart. The next morning, it starts off so innocently... "Hi" and then "We've got a few updates for you" But quickly it turns more sinister, "Do not turn off your computer" And you notice the lack of punctuation. "This may take a few minutes" A few minutes? I once let it run for over an hour with no end in sight. "This is taking longer than expected" All the while the screen goes from black to a fading blue. Is Microsoft teasing us with a reminder of the dreaded blue screen of death? I press the reset button. See? I didn't turn it off, I reset! Really, I promise! Finally, Microsoft relents, and I get my machine back. But I feel more like I'm borrowing it. From Microsoft.

I got bad news for ya, Willy. Microsoft is actually just letting you borrow your computer... From the NSA.

All joking aside, as long as there are computer, there will be crashes, softlocks, hardlocks, and panics. They can be masked one way or another, and they may be slightly less frequent than they used to, but they will always be there. As a previous owner of a MacBook that had a stick of RAM go bad and cause a kernel panic at least once a day, with absolutely no indication of what went wrong (had to diagnose the hardware myself) I can say that the blue screen is honestly not the worst way of handling exceptions. I'm glad Windows 10 typically handles them better (dat new task manager tho), but you've never experienced real frustration until you use a system that doesn't handle them at all and just hardlocks with a message to "restart your computer." (Cue flawed "Macs never crash" argument)

As far as the issue your having, I thought the Windows 10 installer was supposed to fade through a bunch of colors, starting with blue. Maybe I'm thinking about Windows 8... I can't honestly remember. Sounds like there was a big update/service pack and something hung up. If it's back up and running, it probably just installed and failed to finish booting the desktop.

« Last Edit: August 10, 2017, 06:58:56 PM by D2Disciple »

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I, for one, hope this is much, much more than a reconnaissance mission.

I think it may be because I have an old printer installed that doesn't run on W10, and it keeps looking for an update but can't find one.

One day I had a client stop at the house to pay a bill, and I needed to print out an invoice for her and Microsoft had chosen that moment to torture me with Update Hell. That was bad, as I wasn't sure when it was really done and I could reset it. Now I hit reset as soon as it loops and when it reboots it's a little slow to start but I haven't had any issues.

So your saying that now your continually stuck in an update cycle every time you reboot / turn on the computer? That doesn't sound right... Have you tried going to the Windows Update applet and seeing if there's an update selected that's unnecessary or not functioning?

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I, for one, hope this is much, much more than a reconnaissance mission.

You know, now that I think about it, I think my Win1o laptop had the same problem once...I can't recall what I did to fix it though...but it did get fixed. Maybe I manually applied the update on my own time instead of letting the system choose to do it automatically?...I can't remember...

No, no, no, only when it updates, and needs to restart to finish, then when I turn it back on the next day, then it gets stuck in continuous loop, or that's what it seems to be doing, but after a while I figured out I could just hit the reset button and nothing bad happens, it doesn't brick the computer or corrupt my files or anything. It's still update hell but I found a way out.